Belgium has begun construction near Antwerp of a new nuclear reactor powered by a particle accelerator that will generate 100 times less waste than a traditional one and is expected to serve as a pioneering tool in the fight against cancer.
The project, called Myrrha (Multipurpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-Tech Applications) and located at the Centre for Nuclear Energy Studies (SCK CEN) in Mol, in the northwest of the country, should complete its first phase in 2026-2028, the second in 2033 and become fully operational around 2036-2038, according to the most optimistic forecasts.
The subcritical reactor, which will be able to generate in 1 second the energy consumed by a family in a year, will not have enough fissile material to sustain the atomic chain reaction on its own and it will be the neutrons produced by the Minerva accelerator that will feed the core of Myrrha so that it functions.
Safer and cleaner
The final structure will be 300 metres long with a power of 2.4 megawatts and will be safer than traditional reactors, as it will be able to turn on and off in a matter of thousandths of a second, which reduces the possibility of an accident due to uncontrolled fission.
“It is the accelerator that controls the reactor. If we stop the accelerator, in a microsecond, the reactor stops,” said project director Hamid Aït Abderrahim in statements reported by public broadcaster RTBF.
At the end of the first phase, the linear particle accelerator will have a maximum power of 100 megaelectronvolts (MeV), which will increase to 600 MeV, enough to power the reactor that will be built in a third phase of the project.
However, from the end of the first phase the accelerator will be able to produce innovative medical radioisotopes.
Hybrid financing project
The innovative project was first conceived in 1998 and its first phase is funded with 558 million euros by the Belgian government and European funds, out of a total budget of 1.6 billion euros to complete its full development by the end of the next decade, which will require attracting private investment.
Another advantage that Myrrha promises is that it will be used to conduct research on “transmutation” to reduce the volume and useful life of nuclear waste, whose radiotoxicity will be reduced from 300,000 to 300 years.
The idea is to recover fissile material used by nuclear power plants and reprocess part of it for reuse, while reducing the useful life of the waste from a reactor that will not be cooled with water but with a mixture of lead and bismuth, which also promises to become a future option for the nuclear industry.
According to Aït Abderrahim, if the Myrrha experimental project were to work as expected and 15 reactors of this type were to be built on an industrial scale, all the fuel used by European nuclear power plants could be treated at a lower cost than at present.
A study by the consultancy firm PwC estimates that the economic impact of the project, which currently involves 230 people from 25 different countries, will be 6.4 billion euros.
“With this project, our country continues to be a pioneer in nuclear research, with a focus on medical applications,” said Federal Energy Minister, environmentalist Tinne Van der Straeten.
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